It’s Monday and if you’re still a tiny bit embarrassed to be paying for a blue checkmark on X, you might want to take a deep breath—because the platform won’t let users hide their verified status for much longer.

SHOPPING SPREE

YouTube’s latest tool lets creators put together their own shoppable Collections

YouTube Shopping is getting a springtime touch-up. Creators can look forward to four big updates, including the debut of a brand-new product curation tool.

Update #1: YouTube is giving creators the ability to curate Shopping Collections by choosing buyable items to display on shelves in their “product list, Store tab, and video description.”

Update #2: YouTube is beefing up its affiliate marketing model with a new Affiliate Hub. Creators can visit that destination to discover Shopping partners, browse commission rates, and score promo codes.

Update #3: Last year, YouTube gave a select number of creators access to a long-awaited affiliate product tagging tool. Now, the platform is at last rolling out that feature to all creators.

Update #4: Fourthwall—a creator-focused website builder founded in 2019—is joining the list of integrated platforms whose stores can be ported over to YouTube channels.

The context: Back in September, TikTok made a splash by officially introducing Shop in the U.S.—a launch it capitalized on by wooing buyers and sellers with subsidized price drops and low fees.

• While TikTok Shop sellers have since emphasized the importance of influencer marketing, TikTok may be deprioritizing the role of its creator community. A new report claims the app is developing AI influencers that would allow brands to cash in on the benefits of influencer marketing without partnering with real-life creators.
  
  

• By contrast, YouTube’s ecommerce efforts have been defined by a creator-focused approach. The platform has now brought storefronts to more than 100,000 channels—a number that's likely to grow as affiliate marketing tools before more accessible to more creators.

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• Talent management company Odd Projects has brought in Brian Sokolik as managing partner and Joshua Cohen (no relation to Tubefilter’s co-founder) as talent manager. (Tubefilter)
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• Uber Eats has announced a vertical video feed (à la TikTok) that will promote restaurants and dishes. (Tubefilter)
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• Certain Taylor Swift songs have returned to TikTok despite the ongoing dispute between the app and Universal Music Group. (Tubefilter)
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• Bluesky has announced a policy update that will allow heads of state to create accounts on its platform. (Engadget)

DATA • MILLIONAIRES 📈

With a growing wig collection and a knack for acting, this creator is always a character

How it started: OuttPig spent a good chunk of his childhood and young adulthood in theater classes. Acting was his calling—but when it came time to pick a college major, he wasn’t sure theater was his best bet.

• Instead, the creator (whose IRL name is Cameron Perez) settled on criminology administration. Studying that subject went fine for a while, but it didn’t exactly satisfy Perez’s passion for acting.
  
  

• So, when TikTok blew up in 2020, the creator decided to give it a shot. He’d grown up watching vloggers like Emma Chamberlain and figured he might as well start out with that format. But after “talking to the camera” for a while, a different idea popped into his head.
  
  

• Perez began posting dozens of character-based skits, most of which called for at least one wig. It wasn’t long before those multi-part series began earning millions of views per video, leading the creator to ditch college for a full-time career in content creation.

How it’s going: Almost four years later, Perez entertains nearly 4 million TikTok followers and has built followings on both YouTube and Snapchat. His hilarious skits still attract millions of views—not to mention the attention of major brand partners like HelloFresh, Peacock, Vita Coco, and 7-Eleven.

What’s next: Perez is ready to take his YouTube channel to the next level. In addition to tackling a variety of challenges and collabs, the creator plans to expand into new genres by focusing on food and personality-driven content:

KEEPING IT REAL

BeReal is breaking out a brand-new feature just in time for Coachella

The big reveal: BeReal is giving users a new way to share their “real-life human experiences.” The app has announced the debut of RealEvents, a feature that curates virtual galleries of popular locales by gathering posts from event-goers. First up: Coachella.

The debut: BeReal has teamed up with artists like Tinashe to launch the very first RealEvents group at this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. According to a company blog post, the app is accepting both in-person and remote submissions centered on the big event.

• All attendees will have access to a “custom timeline” documenting the festival—plus video montages created by the platform—and will be able to post up to six Coachella-focused BeReals each.

The context: As giants like Instagram and TikTok reckon with the best ways to sustainably compensate creators, BeReal is angling to claim its own piece of the monetization pie.

• RealEvents is the latest of several features to stem from that mission; the platform has already launched multiple in-house products to facilitate sponsored content and is in the process of onboarding celebs and companies as “RealPeople” and “RealBrands.”

LISTEN UP 🎙️

This week on the podcast…

In the hot seat: On the latest installment of Creator Upload, hosts Josh Cohen and Lauren Schnipper contemplate a question that has long plagued the Reels community: is Instagram criminally underpaying creators?

• Check out this week’s episode to find out how Meta’s monetization programs actually stack up to YouTube’s. It’s all right here on Spotify and Apple Podcasts 

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Today's newsletter is from: Emily Burton, Sam Gutelle, and Josh Cohen. Drew Baldwin helped edit, too. It's a team effort.